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Mar 28, 2013

You may have seen that title and clicked on it out of
curiosity (at least I hope you did, because that was the point). That curiosity
is essentially summed up like this: You saw the title, and you said to
yourself, “Self, what do amethysts and cockleburs have to do with each other?”
That, my friend, is a very good question. I will explain, but not right away. I
like dragging things out.

Recently in the Go Teen Writers Facebook group, I saw
someone asking how you turn something random into a novel. I’ve done the same
thing myself several times, although only one of those resulting novels got
written, but I’d never really thought about it. So I said to myself, “Self, how
do you turn something random into a
novel?”

I puzzled over this on and off for a couple of days. Today,
however, I had completely forgotten about it until I was taking some pretty
random but vaguely artsy-looking pictures with my nice new camera. And what
with one thing and another, there appeared a blog post out of the middle of it.
Funny how that happens.

What you do, is you start with a Thing.

It may be a small Thing. It may be a large Thing. In my
pictures, it’s a tiny bottle filled with even tinier amethyst chips – my
birthstone, you see. Which is great, since I love tiny things. In my book, it
was an image. A cloudy sky, a huge plain. A girl riding a sweaty bay horse, her
white-blond hair dancing around her face and the long grass whipping the
horse’s legs. She had something important in her saddlebags, and that was all I
knew. I didn’t know what it was, didn’t know where she was, didn’t even know
her name. I just had a picture.

Some ideas come more fully developed than that one, some even
less so – just a fleeting whisper of emotion, a memory half-buried in sand. I
read once that once an idea first appears out of your subconscious into your
conscious mind, you have three seconds to grab onto it before it’s gone. One of
the ideas waiting for me to write goes like this:

first impressions; ideas; fireflies; 3 seconds; something new

That’s it. Talk about random. About as random as a bottle of
amethyst chips. While we’re being random, a goldfish only has a memory span of
three seconds. That means that just as they grab onto their wonderful idea,
they’ve forgotten it. Poor goldfish.

Where you get your Thing is entirely irrelevant. If you want
to write but you don’t have one, go generate one. Pick up a pencil and paper
and draw whatever your hand wants to draw. Swirl your coffee and see what
shapes it reminds you of. Generate something on Chaotic Shiny.

Okay, you say, staring at the idea in your brain. Now what?

This is where you add your cocklebur.

Uhm. What’s that doing
there?

It’s your job to find out. In writer’s terms, this is called
conflict. It’s a magical word. It might come in the form of an event, another
character, divine intervention, whatever. In my case, it was the sudden
intrusion of an armed warrior galloping up behind my unnamed character. Uh-oh.

At this point, I knew this person wasn’t friendly, and that
he wanted whatever she had in her saddlebags. The original situation and the
intruding conflict has changed many times over the course of my revisions, but
the general idea remains the same. Make something happen.

In my image, I could see the conflict, latent in her
tear-streaked face and the splotches of sweat on her horse’s hide. I didn’t
realize that was what I saw. I just saw a story, waiting for me. She was
obviously sad – hence, the tears – and had been running for a long time – thus,
the sweaty horse. Put that together with the valuable thing in her saddlebags,
and someone is chasing her. Oh no!
Here he comes now!

Introduce a seemingly unrelated element, then connect the
pieces. This can also be called the Inciting Incident, and there’s a lot more
about it…well, everywhere. My most recent encounter with plot structure was in
Jeff Gerke’s book, Plot vs. Character,
which might possibly be the prize in my first-ever giveaway, whenever that
happens. Stay tuned…

So now things are starting to happen, but where do you go
from there?

You need another Thing.

A harmonica? Eh, well. I was running out of props.

Follow the original situation as far as it takes you, but if
you get stuck, drop a body from the ceiling (Daniel Schwabauer-ese for: do
something unexpected). In my case, the armed rider and his cronies captured my
character and had her in their cave hideout with a sword to her throat,
demanding to know where it was.
(You’ll notice that I still have no clue what it is, I’m just playing along until I need to.) What could she
possibly do? She was stuck. I was stuck.

Enter – new character!

A tall-dark-and-handsome elf started demanding to be
involved. It pretty much went like this:

T-D-H-E: Hey.

Me: Huh? What?

T-D-H-E: Write me in.

Me: Why? And who are you, exactly?

T-D-H-E: Doesn’t matter. I’m gonna rescue her. Write me in.

Me: O…kay.

Again, it doesn’t matter where you get your new element,
whether it’s another character or something else. Scan Pinterest for
interesting faces. Watch people in the grocery store. Base a personality off
your teenaged nephew or your grandpa or your dog.

T-D-H-E eventually grew into the enigmatic elf we all know
and love: Aaron. He’s no less tall-dark-and-handsome, but he’s much more human
now, a fact I’m inordinately proud of. But anyway.

Once he rescued her, they were running through the empty
plain at night and nothing was happening again. The cocklebur, the main
conflict, was gone; all I had left were the amethysts and the harmonica. That’s
when you bring in the inter-character conflict, which looks a lot like this:

Crack open the first character and examine their insides.
Not literally. There might be time for that later, depending on how ruthless a
writer you are. What I mean is, dig up some anger, break out some insecurities,
crash two cultures together – whatever works. Crank up the emotions. Let it all
spill out and let some get on the other character(s) too. Make them argue. Make
them fall in love. Make them relate like two ordinary human beings. In my
example, Character 1 insulted T-D-H-E by suddenly noticing that he was an elf
and making a big deal out of it, since she’d never seen one before. That set up
tension for the rest of the night, although her astonishment and his
standoffish-ness didn’t last long, due to…well, more cockleburs.

And between the cockleburs and the amethysts, I promise
you’ll soon have something going that you can’t stop.

Note: All these pictures are under a Creative Commons
license. Use them for whatever you wish. It would be nice if you credited me,
but you don’t have to. Comment for full-size versions. Advice is my own.

Mar 25, 2013

So it's actually Monday this time. I'm proud of myself. ;) I was going to post something else, but I figured I'd hint at it now and post it in a couple days. It has pictures and everything. Don't miss it!

So today there's no epic, because I'm feeling introspective instead of epic today. It may be because I got no writing done whatsoever and am trying to figure out what's wrong. But today's video is pretty far from my usual genre. (And I know it has a strange screenshot, but seriously, just listen to it.)

I'm actually not sure what genre it is. Pop? Alternative? The lyrics website says it's electro-indie. This is the sort of thing I listen to when I'm not getting ideas from Epic. I usually end up picking pieces out of songs like this, since the video is so cryptic any attempt at giving it a plot would probably end up in disaster.

I love her voice, though, and the dusky, pastel color scheme. The impressions I get are someone grieving, a tragic event of some sort, regret, a bittersweet new beginning. Anyone else got any ideas?

Mar 23, 2013

As I sit here, crunching an onion ring and drinking fruit juice out of a small paper box, I think, "I feel like a professional."

Never mind that I've written a 200k word novel. Never mind that this is what I want to do for the rest of my life. Never mind that I just spilled my fruit juice on my pajamas. Never mind that I'm still in my pajamas at 1 PM.

I feel like a professional because I graph out my scenes in MS Paint.

Oh, yes. Isn't that what all the professionals do? Acting them out yourself is a thing of the past! Now, with the new and improved MS Paint that comes with Windows 7, you can do EVERYTHING!

I recently found this out when I was trying to figure out which arm my FMC (female main character) was going to drag my MMC2 (male main character 2) by. Exhibit A:

You can see here my three MCs and one RAC (reoccurring annoying character) and two dragons. One is dead and the other one is not entirely sure what's going on. I couldn't figure out the scene in my head, but I knew character C (Chayten) wanted character W (Wyn) to help him drag character I (Iri, who is not dead, but passed out) across the clearing, to where character A (Aaron) is very concerned about character B (Blaze). Character S has nothing to do with any of this because, as I mentioned, she is dead.

*slurps from juice box, then continues*

This helped me cement the scene in my mind, but it was really only the bare bones of what MS Paint was offering me. As you can see, I hadn't remembered how to draw shapes or add text yet, only how to wiggle around with the sorry excuse for a pencil. Half the characters' limbs aren't really connected, Iri has an extraordinarily long arm, and I'm not sure whether Aaron is running to Blaze or just getting ready to kick him. I'm not sure how I missed all the nice colors hanging around the top of the program, but I noticed them next time.

Exhibit B.

There was really much more going on in this scene, but I didn't want to add all the bodies. Iri is, once again, passed out (there seems to be a theme developing here, but, sadly, it died because in my third attempt Iri is very much awake) and Aaron is being out of character because he is gloating. Obviously he doesn't really say "LOL", but I still hadn't figured out how to make text so I wanted something short and sweet. You can see that I've discovered color (the squiggly things are trees) and the different brushes, but I'm really not sure what the fire is doing. Maybe trying to take over.

*licks onion ring grease off fingers*

This was also another try at cementing the scene in my mind. I wasn't sure exactly where Iri was passed out and Aaron was gloating over him, so I stuck a few placeholding trees in (trees are good at that) and then put them in the most logical area.

So today I realized that there's this magical little "A" icon at the top of the magical program which can magically add magical text to your picture, thus enabling me to label the characters. Like so:

Details have finally arrived. Notice the little sprigs of grass along the corners of the tents, the stalks of straw sticking out of the bale Iri is hiding behind, and the waaaaay too many stars in the sky because, once I discovered details, there was no going back. In case you were wondering, no, Syphir is not a girl. He just has long hair. He also needs a knee replacement. And Fairfax, Aaron, and Faulkner really are tied to those posts, but the posts are between us and them (and I drew the posts firsts) so, being lazy, I didn't draw them in. We'll just pretend they're there. The fire is much more under control now and all of the characters have hair the right color and length. Iri and Syphir are getting ready to ambush a clueless sentry (the sentry actually is whistling in the scene) and rescue Fairfax, Aaron, and Faulkner.

Poor sentry.

I even made the tents 3-D.

So there's your lesson for the day, folks. If you want to feel like a professional, use Paint. And don't squeeze your juiceboxes.